Obama and McCain face off in 2nd debate

Obama and McCain face off in 2nd debate

Published: October 8, 2008

With public anxiety mounting over financial markets and the economy, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain engaged in a spirited debate here Tuesday night over who was to blame for the current economic mess and whose plan would successfully address it.

In the second presidential debate, at Belmont University in Nashville, Obama faulted the Bush administration and by extension McCain for a deregulatory environment that he said led to the nation's economic crisis. And McCain, pledging to aid struggling homeowners, offered a new proposal to direct the federal government to save families from foreclosure by purchasing mortgages that were no longer affordable.
"As president of the United States," McCain said in response to an audience member's question, "I would order the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes, at the diminished value of those homes and let people make those, be able to make those payments and stay in their homes. Is it expensive? Yes."
Obama aggressively engaged McCain throughout the debate, and repeatedly focused on bread-and-butter struggles of Americans, vowing to help them with a "rescue package" for the middle class, and not just banks and insurance companies on Wall Street. The first part, he said, was tax cuts for all American households making less than $250,000 a year.
"It means help for homeowners so that they can stay in their homes," Obama continued. "It means that we are helping state and local governments set up road projects andbridge projects that keep people in their jobs. And then long term we've got to fix our health care system, we've got to fix our energy system that is putting such an enormous burden on families."
The plunging markets in the United States and overseas and a freeze in commercial and consumer credit brought added urgency to Tuesday night's debate, with questioners at the town-hall style forum pressing the candidates for how they would address the spiraling financial crisis. But often the candidates seized on the questions to attack each others' records.
While Obama and McCain were outwardly civil to one another, they watched each other warily, sometimes with a thin smile, sometimes with a look of exasperation, as the other spoke directly to members of the audience. And somertimes McCain strolled across the stage as Obama spoke, generously peppering his answers with the words "my friends."
McCain aggressively pursued Obama's record in the Senate, claiming he had voted for billions of dollars in unneeded spending, including $3 million for a "projector for a planetarium in Chicago."
Obama said that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, had accepted money for consulting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants taken over by the federal government last month to protect them from collapse.
Neither Obama nor McCain offered an optimistic view of the American economy. Obama said that the nation was reaping the bitter fruit of eight years of the Bush administration's fiscal mismanagement and drive to deregulate markets, moves he said were supported by McCain.
McCain said that the way out of the current crisis depends on what actions the government takes. He called American workers "innocent bystanders" in the economic storm and said that one of his priorities would be to rid Washington of cronyism, greed and corruption.
"The system in Washington is broken and I have been a consistent reformer," McCain told one questioner who wanted to know why Americans should trust either party because both were complicit in the policies that led to the current problems.
Obama said: "I understand your frustration and your cynicism. There's a lot of blame to go around."
Pressed to name the most urgent problems they would address — health care, entitlement spending, or energy — Obama cited energy and health care first, while McCain said there was need to prioritize, bu then said entitlement spending should be put in check first.
And Obama often sought to connect with the crowd in personal terms.
He spoke of the importance of spending $15 billion a year over 10 years to become energy independence, noting "You're paying $3.80 here in Nashville" for gasoline. But he also called for making health care more accessible, saying that the "broken health care system is bad, not only for families, but it's making our businesses less competitive."
And he questioned the wisdom of McCain's tax cut plan, which he said would cost the nation $300 billion and would benefit large corporations, including oil companies.